


Bird on a Wire

by WorldEnder



Category: The Outsiders - All Media Types, The Outsiders - S. E. Hinton
Genre: Boyfriends, Father-Daughter Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Greasers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-07 07:24:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7705726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WorldEnder/pseuds/WorldEnder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tale of Two-Bit's sister. Multi-chapter, in progress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

SE Hinton owns The Outsiders. In it, she mentions Two-Bit’s mother and father, and that he has a sister. This one of my imaginings of them.

**Bird on a Wire**

Like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free. - Leonard Cohen

 

 One-

My mother was downstairs yelling at my father because he’d come into the house without knocking and reeking of fuel oil. He was calling her _baby_ and telling her he had some child support money, and she was telling him she didn’t want any damned money he’d made siphoning off people’s fuel oil from their tanks and then taking it up to Pawhuska and selling it at half price to the Indians.

“Goddamnit, woman, I’ve been driving a truck. It’s honest money. Take it or don’t, but don’t be calling the cops on me saying I never gave you any money for the kids.”

“Your son ain’t even a minor anymore, Matt. Did you know that? He’s been eighteen since April.”

“I know when my own son was born. Give him the money. Tell him it’s for his birthday.”

“What about Lark?”

“What about her? Her birthday’s in March. See- I remember that too. I was in the Veterans Hospital in March, and then I was in jail.”

I heard my mother sigh.

“Are those two things related?” She asked him, and then withdrew the question. “Never mind it. I don’t want to know.”

He started in telling her anyway. I slid down and sat at the top of the stairs to listen. The way he was talking- the speed and the undulation of his voice- told me that we were in for a long haul. He’d been in a fight in Oklahoma City. It wasn’t him who started it- of course. He’d been drinking with some buddies, or he’d thought they were buddies. They all stepped aside when the fight started. The other guy- the one who started it- beat my dad down to the floor and kicked him until he was unconscious. He was an oil rig man, wearing heavy boots. My dad’s ribs were broken and he was told by the doctors at the VA that he might never get all of his memory back.

“And that’s why you’re late with the money?” My mother asked. “You forgot?”

“Christ, no. I told you, I was in the hospital and then in jail. I had to serve a few days for disturbing the peace on account of the fight. Court took all my money. I had to earn back what I had to bring it to you.”

**

Our dad had fought and insubordinated his way out of the U.S. Army. He’d never even made it to Korea. He’d done time in federal prison for bookmaking- committed while in the Army, and a few times since for armed robbery, operating public card games, and fencing horses.

What our dad did on the other side of the law didn’t rank nearly so high on his list of crimes against our mother as his perpetual tardiness or that he’d taken up with other women “a time or two”. I remembered one time when he’d come to the house with a girl on his arm with the intention of introducing her to us kids. He and the girl were both feeling no pain. They’d burst into hysterical giggles when my mom pulled one of his guns out of a drawer and expressed her desire that they take a flying leap.

“Addie,” he pleaded to my mother. “Just take the money. God’s honest truth, I come by it clean.”

My mother was done arguing. I heard a small creak as she no doubt folded her arms across her chest and leaned back against the kitchen counter.

My father appealed. He called out for me: “Sis? Sister, I know you’re there. Come on down here. Daddy’s got something for you.”

“Goddamnit, Matt,” my mother said, and then, “Don’t you move an inch, Lark. This is between me and this son of a bitch who keeps calling himself your father.”

“I _am_ her father. You trying to tell me something different?”

“You know what I mean, Matt.”

I stood up on the stairs. The bannister made a noise, and announced to my mother that I had moved. I heard her turn around and start throwing things into the sink. The water was running. She had given up on my father and me, and had moved on.

There was no more hiding. I tightened my bathrobe and pushed my hair back with my fingers. I came down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“There’s my Meadow Lark,” he said. My father had named me Lark because I was born in the spring, he said. I suspected it was also because he could make a million different nicknames from it: Meadow Lark, his Red-Winged Lark, Sparrow, Alouette, Birdy, Song Bird, the list went on.

When I stepped out of the shadow of the hallway, though, he changed his tune.

“Well, shit,” he said. “I guess it has been a while.”

I’d gotten pregnant in March, around the time my father was getting his ass beaten in a bar in Oklahoma City. My mother hadn’t made me go to back to school when August rolled around.

“When did this happen?” He asked me. He started looking around in a panicked-kind of way, like maybe it was dawning on him that his absence from my life might have somehow done me some harm.

“Where’s your brother? Where’s Keith at? He took care of this guy, right?”

“No,” my mother answered for me. “No one is taking care of anyone around here. She hasn’t told us.”

My father narrowed his eyes at me.

“Do _you_ know?” He asked.

“Yeah, it just ain’t important.”

Before he could answer, my mother started in again.

“You hear that, Matt? Where ever do you think she’d get the idea that her child’s father being around isn’t important?”

“Christ, shut up, Addie. Just let me think…” He rubbed his hand across his forehead. Then he said to me, “Sister, go get yourself dressed. You and I are going to breakfast. Go on, hurry now.”

I looked back and forth between him and my mother. I was seventeen and taller than my mom, but she was- and always would be- the heavyweight I couldn’t dethrone. It was her house I was living in, she reminded me almost daily. The only power I had to wield on this earth was the name of my baby’s father.

My mother only shrugged though.

“Go on, if you want, Lark. You might as well. We both know you and that kid aren’t going to see a lot of grandparenting out of him.”

That seemed to wound my father. He didn’t smart back at her. He just pointed with his chin towards the stairs. I nodded and retreated to get dressed.

**

“How far gone are you then?”

That was the first thing he asked me when he got me in the car. The radio came on when he started the engine, but he switched it off. I noticed his fingers shaking when he tried to light a cigarette. It didn’t strike me that he was angry, but then I had never seen him scared. I didn’t know what this was.

“About Six months,” I told him.

“And where the hell is your brother?”

“What does it matter?”

My brother was, himself, in jail. He’d put his fist through the window of a car and stole a pack of cigarettes. Two-Bit was not our father’s caliber of criminal. He’d never done hard time, and never stole anything with a purpose the way our dad stole fuel oil.

“It matters because I count on him to take care of these things, watch over you and your mother, be the man…”

“Why don’t you stick around once and a while and do that?”

We came to the end of the block and he hit the brakes a little too hard. I dug my fingers into the seat cushion.

“Listen, little girl,” he said. “I didn’t take you out of that house and away from your mother’s digging just to listen to you give me lip. I’m still your father, and I have expectations of you and your brother. I expect him to look after things.”

“What do you expect of me?”

“A name.  If we’d had this conversation a few months back, I’d be telling you I’d expect you to not be getting yourself knocked up like this. Seeing as that’s a little late, I’m asking that you own up to who the daddy is.”

“So you can storm the fort and beat him up? That’ll sure be helpful.”

“Or I could drive you up to a back road north of Catoosa and let you off to walk home. How does that sound to you, smart ass?”

“Might send me into early labor.”

His eyes darted in my direction, a sign that he was thinking on it and was now terrified that I could go into labor right there in the car with him.

“Are you going to give it away, then?” He asked. “You know that’s the best thing to do. There’s people in this town with more money than they know what to do with looking to raise up babies…white babies. You don’t have to tell them about me.”

My father was on the Roles at Tahlequah. His grandparents on his father’s side had walked to Oklahoma from Georgia as kids in the 1830s.

“I ain’t telling anybody anything,” I said. “I don’t need your breakfast. Go on and drive me up to Catoosa and let me walk, if that’s what feels like discipline to you.”

“Goddamn,” he whispered, and, “Goddamned Keith. Where’s he at? I want to take him to breakfast too.”

I smirked at the dashboard.

“He’s unavailable,” I said. It required no further explanation.

My father still hadn’t lit his cigarette. He kept tapping it down on the steering wheel. It had to be about packed like gunpowder in a musket by now.

“How old is he, then?”

I knew he meant the father of my baby, but I told him, “Keith’s eighteen,” just to be evil and because it was Two-Bit we’d been talking about last.

“Damnit, little girl, I know how old Keith is. How old is this boy- the one who doesn’t have a name?”

“He’s…I don’t know. A little older than Keith.”

“And it never occurred to you that there might be something a little funny about him?”

“Funny how?”

“What’s he doing with a little girl like you? Why doesn’t he want a girl his own age- a woman? So, what’s wrong with him?”

This was my father trying to be crafty. He was trying to make me think this guy was some kind of pervert and make me feel bad about the whole thing. As if I didn’t already feel bad.

“He’s alright, Daddy.”

“Really? He’s alright? If he’s so alright, then I’ll give you a nickel when we get to the restaurant. You call him up and ask him to join us. I’ll be the judge of how alright is or he ain’t. You ask me, though, this guy’s a goddamned pederast.” He thought about that a minute, and then he got nervous. “How exactly did this happen now..?”

“You know _how_ it happened.”

He squeezed his eyes shut for a second and shook his head, like he was trying to purge an image from his mind.

“Damnit…I mean, did he force himself on you?”

“I said he was an alright guy, didn’t I?”

“Christ, Lark, how would you even know?”

And that was the worst possible thing he could have said. How would I ever know now? I was going to have a baby, and no boy was ever going to ask me on a date or out to a dance again.

I felt a lump swell up in my throat. I hit the car door with my fist.

“Let me out. I want to get out. Let me out, or I’m going to be sick.”

My father pulled over to the curb right there on Peoria. Between us, we probably knew everyone in every car flying by. I got out and slammed the door and started walking away into a parking lot. When he saw that I wasn’t really going to be sick, my father hit the horn.

I turned back. I wished I hadn’t because now there were tears streaming down my face. I started walking again. Behind me I heard the other car door slam.

“Sister, get back here. I ain’t some little boy you can pout at and twirl around your finger. I’m your father, I got three open warrants on me, and I’m illegally parked.”

I couldn’t help it- I smirked and choked on a laugh. I stopped walking and turned around to face him.

True to his word, he hadn’t put a whole lot of effort into running after me. He was standing on his side of the car, leaning with his arms folded on the roof. He’d finally got that cigarette fired up. It was burning down fast in the wind. Cars were coming up suddenly and having to dart around him. He didn’t even turn to look.

He opened his hands and cocked his head- his “how about it, then?” gesture that he always gave to Mom. I wondered if that meant I was an adult in his eyes now or if I was just another person on his list of people to bullshit.

My father looks tough. He looks like my brother, but wind-burned and with darker hair. There’s a mermaid tattooed on his left bicep. He used to tell me stories about her when I was a kid- before that I knew that he’d never seen the ocean because he’d never actually been sent to Korea. All my life, he’s been lying to me.

I decided to stick to my guns and shrugged at him.

“What? What does that mean?” A car flew by and honked. He chucked his nearly-spent cigarette at it and muttered a fond farewell. “Are you going to eat breakfast or not, Sister? Do you really feel sick?”

“Just sort of dizzy. I feel like that a lot. They said the baby’s about the size of an ear of corn. My equilibrium’s off, I guess.”

“I’m not ready for this, Lark.”

“You think I am?”

“I just trying to imply that your little escapade here is affecting a lot more people than just you. That kid, for one. Me, for another. And your mom- Holy Christ. Has she even let you out of the house in six months?”

“I didn’t really start showing until a few weeks ago. I hid it for a long time. I didn’t tell her.”

“Did she hit the roof?” He smirked, as though he would’ve liked to have seen it.

“No,” I told him. “She didn’t say anything at all. Not for a couple of days.”

He nodded. “That’s the worst. When she does that.”

“She wants me to give it away.”

“Well, you should. It ain’t right, but people don’t treat kids that come out of these circumstances too well.”

I looked down at my feet- what I could see of them- and sighed. I wanted to snap back at my father that people don’t look to kindly on kids whose dads just up and leave one day, and then turn up in jail a few weeks down the line. Most of my life, it’s like he hasn’t been there at all.

“Tell me one more thing,” he said. “Does the boy know?”

“He probably knows by now.”

“But you didn’t tell him.”

I shook my head.

“So he’s not anything to you? He’s not a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Then let it go, my girl. Let it go and be done with it. Let an adult raise it. Let yourself be a kid for a while yet.”

As if to tempt me with the possibility, he held his hand out to me- the way a father might in asking his little girl to dance or take a walk with him. My father didn’t actually intend for me to talk his hand, though. He wanted me to get back in on my side of the car so he could get back in on his. He wanted to get moving before a cop rolled up behind us and started asking questions. He was thinking about what would happen if he got his license run. If he still had a license.

Those things were the things forefront on my father’s mind. I figured I ranked on down there at maybe number four.


	2. Two

Two-  
The truth of it was that the father of my baby had told me to go and not come back. This was before I knew I was pregnant. He said I was too young for him. He was trying to straighten himself out. He liked me, and he said I sure was something to look at, but I wasn’t even legal then, and he wasn’t going to be that kind of man anymore.  
Funny words, they seemed to me, from someone who hadn’t been a man very long himself. He’d racked up a list of indiscretions nearly as long and varied as my father’s. He’d made it to Vietnam, at least, but then come back and done two turns at Macalester for possessing narcotics. I’d met him after he’d come back from the joint the second time. We were at a party that neither of us should have been at- me because I was sixteen at the time, and him because it was no place to be if he was trying to stay clean. He decided to solve that dilemma by playing knight-in-shining-armor and offering me a ride home. He told me his name was Watt Ryan, we got to talking, and- turned out- we kind of liked each other.  
He was twenty-two, though, and I was jailbait. He was on parole and- before he’d been sent down- his house had been raided so many times that he no longer bothered to lock the door. He couldn’t buy a gun or be caught using dope. He had a job hauling fruit off of trucks at a produce warehouse. He said he’d found a spider in a bunch of bananas one time that was as big as his hand.  
My brother had met him. They knew one another from around the neighborhood. He and Two-Bit got in a fight over me right before he cut me loose, but I suspect Two-Bit’s starting it had as much to do with wanting to flash that beloved blade of his as it did running off the twenty-two-year old who was screwing his little sister.  
I told my father none of this as I sat across from him in a booth at the diner of his choosing. I suspect it was because he liked the look of the waitress. In fact, they seemed to know each other in some under-the-table, winking and nudging way. I took her in- her looks and all of the ways she moved that were different than my mother’s- and ate my toast.  
“What’s your brother in for?” My father asked.  
“Stole something.”  
As if my brother was there to say it to, my father grumbled, “You know it’s one thing to be stealing things when you’re old and no one has designs on reforming you. When you’re his age, they think they can still turn you around, and they have all kinds of ways to do that. Right now, they have a convenient war going on to send dumbasses like Two-Bit to fight in.”  
“You should tell him that.”  
“How long’s he got?”  
I shrugged. “Maybe a couple of days more. They won’t keep him from going to school much longer.”  
My father raised an eyebrow from behind his cup of coffee. I knew he was trying to calculate how, looking down the barrel of nineteen years of age- Two-Bit was still in school. I didn’t bother to tell him that Two-Bit was, technically, not even a senior yet.  
“What about you?” He asked.  
“What about me?”  
“How are you going to finish school?”  
“I hadn’t put a lot of thought to it.”  
“Clearly. You got to start thinking, Sis. If they don’t knock you out and take that kid from you as soon as you have it- which I wouldn’t protest a bit myself- you’re going to have to feed it. That’s more than you ought to be putting on your mother and me.”  
I averted my eyes so that he wouldn’t see the mockery I knew was showing in them. It had never entered my mind that my father might contribute to my baby’s wellbeing. I thought about what he had said, though, and asked him:  
“What do you mean they’ll knock me out and take it?”  
“They can do that- the State- if they think you’re not fit to parent. They’ll give you all manner of dope so you won’t remember the labor, then they’ll farm your baby out and tell you it’s for the best. Christ, don’t even tell him about me, of they’ll likely sterilize you too.”  
Whenever my father said not to tell someone about him, it was in reference to his being Cherokee. I knew the stories he was referring to- women from the Indian Hospital in Claremore claiming they had been sterilized without their knowledge after they’d given birth.  
“Would Mom let them do that?”  
He smirked. “This, Miss Sister, is where the rubber meets the road. If you want that baby, you have to tell the daddy. They won’t take it from him if he’s an adult. Christ, girl, how old is he?”  
“He’s twenty-two, I think.”  
My father gulped, like he was trying to hold back his breakfast.  
“Well, then. He’s an adult, to be sure. If you tell him, and he’s agreeable, then he can keep the baby for both of you. If he ain’t agreeable, me and Keith can help him see the light. Christ, he ought to be marrying you.”  
“I ain’t getting married.” I said it a little too loud. A few of the restaurant patrons turned their heads in our direction and frowned, like maybe they thought the old man across the table from me was trying to get me to marry him.  
“I ain’t,” I said, in a softer voice. “I ain’t old enough.”  
“Do I even have to say it? Agreed- you ain’t old enough, and you should have thought of that.”  
The waitress appeared at my father’s shoulder like a cockatoo with a teased-up crown of feathers. She held up a pot of coffee and looked us both over with a raised eyebrow.  
“More coffee, Matt?”  
So, they did know each other.  
“Thanks, Theresa,” he said.  
She was clearly wheedling about my identity when she asked, “and for the young lady?”  
“She don’t drink coffee,” my father said.  
“Yes, I do. Yes, ma’am.”  
I turned my cup over for her. She looked me over while she poured.  
“This must be your daughter, Matt. She’s the spitting image.”  
My father cracked a grin. “Now there’s no reason to be cruel, Theresa.”  
Theresa shook her head the way my mother sometimes did when my father said something self-deprecating. We all of us knew he was flirting. The only one it didn’t work on, it seemed, was me.  
Just to make it stick, I told her, “Matt’s going to be a granddaddy. We’re celebrating.”  
He never missed a beat, didn’t shoot me a look or anything. He said, “More like strategizing. We’ll celebrate when it all comes out tolerable.”  
Theresa didn’t seem phased in the least by either of us. Either she was just as shifty a personality as my father or she had personal experience in situations like mine.  
“Honey, you’re just a little bitty thing. A girl like you still ought to be taking a drop of coffee in her milk and not milk in her coffee.”  
“I just take sugar,” I told her.  
She grinned at that, and I found it hard not to want to like her just a little.  
My father asked her, “You got a break coming any time soon, Theresa?”  
“A break long enough to talk in, or longer?”  
My father shook his head. “A break long enough to maybe join me and this girl here, maybe impart some wisdom.”  
“About having a baby? Hell, Matt, I don’t think I have anything I could tell her there. The only wisdom I have to impart is how to avoid taking up with the kind of men who promise you the stars in the sky, but got no intention of sticking around when those stars come crashing down around you.”  
My father looked annoyed. “And your wisdom in that area isn’t all that great either.”  
Theresa winked at me, turned, and walked away with her coffee pot.  
My father had pulled another cigarette out of his front pocket and was tapping the filter against the table. I was sure I was going to be sick if he lit up in a closed space. I put the coffee cup to my lips. It was too hot to drink, so I just inhaled the smell and hoped it was settle my stomach.  
“You look about done,” my father said. “You look a little green around the gills, Sis.”  
I nodded.  
“You ready then? How about we go pay Keith a visit?”  
That didn’t sound at all like something I wanted to do. All of the sudden, I could smell everything a hundred times stronger than I could before, and the I knew from previous visits to see my brother that the county jail smelled like urine and stale sweat.  
“He’ll be out in a day or two,” I reminded my father.  
He didn’t answer, and it occurred to me then that he had no intention of sticking around that long. He slid out of the booth, and tossed down a tip for Theresa next to his half-empty cup of coffee. He set out for the door with the cigarette between his lips, knowing full-well I was following.  
**  
My father didn’t just intend to visit Two-Bit; he intended to bail him out. This was a new move in his bag of tricks- usually he preached that the best course of action was to sit your time so they couldn’t come after you later with a fine and a bench warrant. That’s the rule in our family: everybody sits his own time.  
Not this time, however. I sat on the wooden bench in the booking room while my father filled out the carbon forms. Every now and then, he’d read some detail of Two-Bit’s escapades that would make him shake his head and laugh. I couldn’t tell whether it was with pride or annoyance.  
The clerk looked over the paperwork and told my father thank you and that it would be about twenty minutes. He could have a seat on the bench and wait. My father took a seat beside me.  
He squirmed and produced his wallet from his back pants pocket.  
“Your mother wouldn’t take my money,” he said. “You reckon she could use some of it anyway?”  
I nodded. I could feel him gearing up to leave. Handing off the money was akin to reading his last will and testament. In a few minutes, he would be gone. He might as well be dead and buried somewhere.  
He stuffed a folded bunch of tens and twenties in my hand. I didn’t take a hard look, but it had to be close to one-fifty. In my head, I tried to figure how long he could have been working since the time of his release in Oklahoma City. I didn’t know how much one made driving a truck, and he hadn’t told my mother what kind of truck it was or who he was driving for. There were a lot of questions, but it didn’t feel as honest as he claimed it was.  
“Where’d you get it?” I asked him.  
“You heard me tell your mother.”  
“What kind of truck?”  
“A big one. What do you know about trucks?”  
“Did it have four hooves and only let you ride for eight seconds?”  
He grinned. He was too proud of his prowess as a bull rider to ignore my question.  
“Yeah, and I rode ‘er for all eight.”  
“Where?”  
“Guthrie.”  
“That couldn’t have been wise- riding bulls right after you were released from the hospital with a head injury.”  
“Well, I had that time in jail in between to recuperate. Don’t tell your mother.”  
And that was it. By now, it was almost our signature good-bye. He pulled a near-empty pack of cigarettes out of his front pocket and waved it at me a little, as if to prove that he needed to go, that it was important.  
Before he stood up, he reached around my shoulders and pulled my head towards him to kiss my temple.  
“You think about this, Sister. You think real hard,” he said, and then he got up and headed for the door. I watched him go like I always did- in wonder of what my mother saw in him, and yet in wonder of what she couldn’t see.  
Ten minutes later, Two-Bit was standing in front of me.  
“Well,” he said, with a grin. “It seems we’re both sprung. Mom send you?”  
I shook my head.  
“You just missed Dad,” I told him.  
“I haven’t missed Dad a bit,” he replied.  
“He bailed you.”  
“He know you’re knocked up?”  
I nodded. “I think he bailed you because he expects you to tune the guy up.”  
“Too bad I haven’t a clue who the guy is. Did you tell him that? Or is it still a big secret?”  
I ignored him, and jerked my head towards the door.  
“Is your car here?” I asked him.  
Two-Bit, following me, shook his head.  
“Nope. It’s sitting in Curtis’ yard waiting on a new fan belt. You got money for a bus?”  
I nodded.  
“Dad give you money?”  
I didn’t want to tell him, but Two-Bit could smell a pay day. It would do no good to lie.  
“Yeah, some. I’m supposed to give some to Mom.”  
Two-Bit shifted on his feet and waited while I dug the money out of my purse. I tried to keep the exact amount hidden from him. In my head, I already had it divided up between a looming electric bill, a tree in the back yard that needed taken down before it fell on the house, and groceries. I didn’t figure a fan belt could cost too much.  
Two-Bit had other plans. He instructed me not to let Mom know he was out. He was going to catch a shower and shave at Curtis’, and then he was going to go see about a girl named Kathy. If that didn’t pan out, there was girl named Lucinda. Whatever the case, he wasn’t coming home and I wasn’t to be seen at the places he was going.  
“Maybe you ought to go see your other old man. Tell him he needs to either cowboy up or skip town.”  
He winked at me. Orchestrating a beat-down was just another on a list of fun activities for a weekday evening to Two-Bit.  
Just for the sake of bursting his bubble, I said, “I think I’m going to buy some diapers. Start stocking up.”


	3. Three

This is SE Hinton’s Tulsa.  
Bird On A Wire  
Three-  
Two-Bit and I went our separate ways. I took a bus as far as Jasper and Utica , and then started walking just to feel the sun on my face. I got as far as the end of the block from Watt’s house- knowing full well he wasn’t home- but couldn’t make myself go any further. At one point, the front door opened and my brother’s buddy Dallas Winston emerged. He paused on the porch to light a cigarette, and then walked off down the block in the opposite direction from me.  
Dallas didn’t really have much of a home. He had a dad, who mostly lived in flop houses and didn’t keep a regular address. Once upon a time, I’d guess he had a mom too. He couldn’t have just sprung out of the earth. He told conflicting stories about her whereabouts, but everyone knew better than to call him on it.  
I guessed that Dally was just couching it at Watt’s. Dally slept where ever he could find a flat surface, and Watt had a couch like everyone else.  
I watched Dally go and then stood like a stump looking at the house. I couldn’t make myself move. The baby, on the other hand, began to move plenty. It was the first time I’d felt it aside from the strange little goldfish flutters at my waistline that could’ve have just as well been muscles stretching. This was a definite kick, or maybe a knock. Someone was in there and making his presence known. A reflex drew my hand to my belly, and I got kicked again.  
Then in my head, I began saying over and over, “No, no, no, no…”  
I looked around for someplace to sit, but ended up just leaning against a light pole.  
A revving engine from a passing car about made me jump out of my skin. With a screech of tires disregarding the pavement beneath them, the car pulled up next to me. The driver leaned across the empty passenger seat to look at me through the open window.  
Another of my brother’s friends: Steve Randal.  
“I didn’t think you were allowed out of your tower, Princess,” He said, smirking. Everything Steve said was accompanied by a smirk. He was harmless, if not particularly pleasant. The real danger was speaking to him and risking a miscommunication with his girlfriend Evie.  
I stayed stuck to the light pole, hand on my belly, and didn’t say a word.  
Steve looked from my face to my hand.  
“So the rumors are true,” he said, amused. “What brings you out on this lovely day, Mathews? And why don’t you tell me about it in the car so’s I don’t get clipped here?”  
I started to protest, saying that it wasn’t far and I was enjoying the weather- neither of which was true anymore. Another car flew by- too close for Steve’s liking- and laid on its horn. Steve glared at me and shoved open his passenger door. I stepped forward and got in.  
“Thank you, Jesus,” he said.  
“Just take me home.”  
He pulled away from the curb and started down the block. We passed Watt’s house, and Steve looked back and forth between it and me. I looked away out my window. It was probably too obvious. Trying to divert his attention from it, I said:  
“I just seen Dally come out of there.”  
“You trying to tell me you’ve been stalking Dally? I know you ain’t that stupid, Lark. No girl I know’s that stupid, except maybe Sylvia Harney, and she can be pretty easily diverted.”  
I wondered aloud what that meant. Sylvia, it had always seemed to me, was just as possessive of Dally as Evie was of Steve, and her claws were twice as long.  
“No longer an issue,” Steve said. “I took care of it. What I’m asking you now- since I know you ain’t pregnant with no demon, lizard-baby of Dally’s, is what you’re doing lurking in the shadows outside of Watt Ryan’s place?”  
“I wasn’t anywhere near Watt’s place.”  
“You noticed Dally coming out of there. Do you think I’m stupid, Mathews? Christ, didn’t Two-Bit clean his clock over you once? Was this before or after that happened?”  
Without thinking, I said, “After,” which was as good as admitting it.  
“Huh,” Steve said. “So neither of you listens real well, do you?”  
“Maybe neither of us just gives a damn what Two-Bit thinks.”  
Steve grinned. “Are you still standing by that? Looks to me like Two-Bit was right. For once. I don’t see old Watt hauling you down to the courthouse and puttin’ a ring on your finger.”  
“I ain’t asked him to. He doesn’t know.”  
“You’re shittin’ me.”  
“No,” I said, and then I turned to face him and plead with everything I had. “And please don’t tell, Steve. Just keep your mouth shut. Don’t tell Two-Bit. Please-to-God don’t tell Evie. Just please…I ain’t told anybody else. I just need some more time to think.”  
“Looks to me like your time’s running out, kid.”  
I hated it when he called me ‘kid’, which he did on plenty of occasions. We were the same age and in the same grade, me and Steve. We’d gone to school together since kindergarten. He was as much still a kid as I was, and I was just as grown up.  
“I change my mind,” I said. “Don’t take me home, okay?”  
“Where am I taking you, then?”  
I didn’t exactly know. I knew what questions I wanted answered, but I didn’t know who to ask them of. My family didn’t have any kind of religion, to speak of. My mom had long since lost her faith in anything, and my dad liked to say that his church was the open road. I told Steve the first name that came to mind.  
“That Catholic services place downtown.”  
“Sure thing, kid. If you want to be verbally abused, though, I’d be happy to just keep driving you around and giving you shit. I don’t think I quite have it in me to call you a whore, but maybe I could work up to it. What do you want to go tangle with them for?”  
“I just want to ask. I want to know what happens if I decide to give it up. I ain’t going to sign anything.”  
Steve shrugged. “Whatever you say, Princess, but I ain’t going in there with you and pretending to be the daddy.”  
“I ain’t asking you to.”  
We both clammed up after that. Steve drove in his fidgety way- like at every stoplight he expected someone to pull up next to him and want to drag. He was forever sizing up every other car on the street.  
“Are you even Catholic?” He asked me.  
“No, we ain’t anything. I just figure this is what the Catholics are famous for, right? They have a system, anyway.”  
“Your funeral,” he muttered and remained silent the rest of the way.  
When we arrived at Holy Family and its adjoining church office, he drove by once and went around the block. When we got back around to the front, he found a place to park and stopped the car.  
“You sure?” He asked. “You want me to go in with you? I know how you get when someone gets you to crying, Lark. We can tell them I’m your brother.”  
I shook my head.  
“We’re the same age. We look the same age.”  
“Maybe we’re twins,” he said. He grinned at me, knowing that his dark eyes and black curls were the antithesis of my blue eyes and red hair. “Maybe I just got all the good looks.”  
“I’m fine, Steve. Thanks for the ride.”  
I got out the car and started walking towards the church office, feeling confident of nothing except that Steve would be sitting there waiting when I got back.


End file.
